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Comment by pdq | Hacker News Reader

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall, which pops up after 2 screens of scrolling in Twitter?

If so, good riddance, as that is an incredibly hostile user pattern.

BTW, maybe it's purely coincidence, but after refreshing my browser cache it seems to have gone away today.

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Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login. First they outright blocked viewing posts unless logged in, then they disabled that, and now brought it back so that random posts are blocked from viewing with a message "This hasn't been reviewed" whatever that means.

Someone at reddit said, hey we can't be honest with users that we're trying to force them to use our app, we need to lie to them while we're doing it!

Agree nothing more hostile than going to reddit on a mobile device these days.

I ended up buying a blocker to block Reddit on my device because of the pain. It’s a shame I couldn’t stop visiting the website just from willpower though.

pihole deploy, blacklist reddit.com

what's there to buy? :)

When you’re on an apple iPhone, everything’s to buy

Maybe Elon buys Reddit next /s

Apollo has the ability to intercept clicks on reddit links and open them in the app. It works pretty well.

I'm kinda hoping that reddit will finally remove old.reddit and the old design, not that I think the new design is good but it would finally make me drop reddit from my social media addiction.

Yeah the new reddit is unusable. Not borderline unusable, but like actually useless. I can't believe they released it and I can't believe people actually use it.

The people that I know who use new reddit, don't even know old reddit exists. They chuckle and say "are you using a website from 2005?" when they see me on old reddit. One of them even works in IT.

Yes I am using a website from 2005. And it's superior in every way.

i.reddit.com works for the most part on mobile (isn't great with media though).

Reddit is doing this because it works and has real impact on the bottom line, and effectively zero impact on user retention. As long as users continue to behave the way they do it would be fiscally irresponsible to shareholders for the company not to do it, same with Twitter.

If you don't like it the best thing you can do is to bounce and never use the product again. Users doing this en masse is the only thing that will get companies to do anything differently.

This is such a short sighted thinking, aggravating users because it makes some "user retention" metric look good.

You can either remain the central forum hub of the internet, or be replaced when the next big thing comes around. Just think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.

> think how many major websites came and went during those last short 20 years.

Notably in the context of this conversation, Digg.

> Nothing could be worse than the crap reddit has been doing for the last year or so to force users (or from their perspective, useds, as rms likes to say) to download its app or login.

They’re doing pretty good… at driving away users. I rarely ever look at Reddit now, particularly compared to a couple years before the change.

If you want just to browse reddit then you can do that through teddit or libreddit front-end instances. And with extensions like Privacy Redirect [1] you can do it automatically.

There are also front-ends for twitter and instagram but these seem to be most faulty - sometimes it takes a while to reach a stable instance and extension tends to overwrite manually selected instances.

Edit: seems there's already a fork of mentioned extension but it's available for manual installation [2]

[1] - https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect

[2] - https://github.com/libredirect/libredirect

That's exactly what got me to use nitter.net to browser twitter. No forced logins. No time limits. No trending section. Most javascript is disabled (you have to click a button to enable it to even play videos). Just tweets.

Not for me, doesn't look like it's changed. But also, it is hilariously unlikely that Parag went "hey I really hate the login wall, you're fired!!"

Twitter will never succeed without satisfying the old school whims of HN users.

Really the company started failing when they turned off Jabber.

Really went downhill when they turned off SMS support.

"Without RSS Twitter will never succeed"

Reddit does the same thing now if you use their website.

Good thing hardly anyone uses their website to read their website

If you click the login button, then click the X, it makes that popup go away. Still annoying but just a little lifehack for ya.

Is he the one who gave final approval of the anonymous login-wall

From the second Tweet in the thread:

Twitter’s DAU has grown by over 87% since Q2 2018 and our team has shipped bold and exciting new evolutions to the product

You can't measure DAU precisely without logged-in users! So... yeah, that's probably a big part of how they got their DAU metric to grow 87%...

I would be very happy if it (asking to login) is gone. If that's the case then I can keep being away from social media accounts and still casually surf twitter.

I got hit with this wall halfway down the thread, really resonated with this comment.

its the reason i completely ignore twitter now. its not a site to reach out to the publicc its a site to communicate to a small subset of logged in users.

I think as far as Twitter is concerned if you never bothered to create an account and your only use of Twitter was being linked to a tweet and then closing the tab you were already ignoring them.

I created an account. I followed some people. They told me it looked like I was a bot and needed to send them a scan of my ID. I laughed and just favorited the few people I wanted to follow. Now I can't even browse their stuff without getting the popups blocking it

So twitter is dead to me.

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